Towards A Definition of Art Through Personal Memoir

Above is a candid polaroid of me hanging out in the bad, old Times Square circa 1979. I was evidently waiting with my parents to attend a matinee on Broadway. I am not exactly sure of the title but I believe it was this middlebrow play/musical starring, (and a less likely candidate to be in such a project), Liv Ullman.

I had known Liv Ullman from a couple of Bergman masterpieces, highbrow in more than one sense of the word, in particular Persona and Face To Face.

I really disliked this show. It was by Charles Strauss of Annie and Bye Bye Birdie fame. My mother cried all during the production because she said the set was an exact replica of the home she had grown up in: the Pittsburg of the 1940s.

I saw so much Broadway during those ten years. It is safe to say that I saw every Broadway or off (off) Broadway project that came through, from commerical musicals to avant-garde plays. The Joseph Papp productions in particular were full of vitality, the closest thing to the experience of a Cassavetes film that could be had on the stage. I saw the earliest examples of gay avant-garde theatre as well, from Charles Ludlum's Theatre Of The Ridiculous, to Lesbian political theatre. I did not always understand what I was seeing but I was never bored or restless.

A couple of times my father would take me down to the older Times Square so that I may study, (and he actually used the words sociology and ethnography, without bothering to define them), the rougher elements of society. He would show me the X-rated marquees and spoke vaguely of how some lonely men likes to watch such things and we discreetly watched drug dealers and hustlers go about their semi/illegal business. He pointed out who the prostitutes were, and they were rather conspicuous, so after awhile I could pick them out. He said that this world had to be contained in this section to satisfy human needs. He never explained what those needs were, only that it had to be contained in this one area because there was danger there.

I saw a lot of things down there that most children are, according to today's rules, never supposed to see, yet everything I saw was in public for the whole world to see. But at least I got a sense that this world was complicated and compromised by considerations of survival and even evil. My father always pointed out that no free will was involved in what I witnessed; rather, circumstances and "what is bred in the bone" had everything to do with it and that I had to feel sorry for the people I witnessed. He also told me that all of these people had good in them somewhere but that it wasn't allowed to shine or come forth. The goodness "was knocked out of them," was how he put it.

 I would often argue in a child's way with him to try and figure out what he meant, but it made for interesting discussions. I was fortunate enough to see a lot of R rated and exploitation fare in that neighborhood, the kind of stuff a child could get in while "accompanied by a guardian".

One of the most interesting things at this time to me is that I would "see" movies and plays that attempted to deal with the themes I had witnessed in real life, in a more condensed and summarized fashion. I would often wonder about the accuracy of the representation or depiction but I felt it curious that humans would reenact such things. Already I was curious about the connection between the arts and daily "real" life.

The following is that same block in which I was pictures above. (Note the Playland sign). The particular picture showing on the marquee - The Legend Of Boggy Creek - was a witless, cheap, and incoherent adventure movie about a mysterious monster in a rural area: it was a children's/family styled horror movie, as oxymoronic as that seems. I am sure I saw this particular run at that very theatre.

Note that the selling point of Caligula is its "sadism, gore, and extreme violence", a shameless celebration of the safely distanced consumption of represented, unreal, yet immoral behaviors for viewing pleasure. I doubt any commercial theater today would announce such motives so nakedly.
And here is the same location today: a gaudy, obscenely congested confection of  candy colored neon,  news images, all of it childish and without any human scale whatsoever.

 Here are some trailers giving a feel of the non-X rated material that would play at some of the movie theaters:

One of the things that occurred to me rather early on is that in one sense all of this stuff - call it culture or the arts - held one thing in common. It was made, constructed, built by human beings so that we might reflect upon our condition in this life.

I mention all of this not to discuss the history of New York City, or my personal life at all; my point is to talk about a basic fact of human existence: that we humans build, construct objects that we can call art so that we may reflect back upon ourselves removed from direct reality.

Indeed I would argue that what I have just stated is the only definition of art that seems to be sufficient enough to define the commonalities: "made-up things by ourselves so that we may reflect back upon ourselves, outside of the daily living".  We might reflect to just undergo catharsis, or for crude thrills; or we might reflect for the deepest of spiritual reasons. But in all Art we are trying in some way to reflect upon our condition. Even a distraction from that condition is still a reflection, a kind of self overhearing or eavesdropping upon our lives. This was what Persona had in common with Smokey and The Bandit and the Mark Rothko at MOMA. It was what Private Afternoons Of Pamela Mann had in common with Pippin, the two sharing more or less the same block. Indeed I think the only arts that don't really do this are the purely utilitarian ones like architecture or visual design. And even in these latter we are expressing the kind of environment in which we would like to exist.

 I had a sense that these were human creations and as such artificial. Only later did I discover the etymological connection between art and artifice.

Yet I had just as an immediate sense that all of these things had very little in common. Some of it was really not worth very much, some of it was boring and disgusting and some of it enlightened my soul and spirit.

Ironically, in a flat culture like the current moment, both of these insights are forgotten. It is by not exploring the commonalities that we inevitably are unable to see crucial differences. The insight of necessary discrimination or quality, and the opposite, though equally valuable, insight of unanimity in creativity.

By treating art as if it were completely natural and at one with the world, as if it weren't the product of individual hard effort (even in collectives!) but somehow a magical appearance in culture, we do what every censor does and what politicos do. We tend to think art is not special and  not apart from everyday life. By hewing to too exclusive a criteria of what art actually is we forget that human beings made  the stage show Pippin just as surely  human beings (including those other than Bergman) made the filmed "show" Persona. Even if one of these two productions is in some deepest, objective sense really better than the other, they nevertheless share the commonality of being manufactured objects.


What I am arguing for is that Art is actually a product. It is very fashionable to describe art as a process these days. The word product has negative connotations of purely commercial intentions. But I would argue that even the least solid artwork, say, a street dance performance, or a computerized light show is nevertheless a built thing. One of the great tragedies in art criticism these days has been the loss of the art object. Everything that lacks the quality of the thing itself is discussed: politics, morality, History and so on. What gets lost is the object.

Indeed, art is not unlike a construction project.

It is no accident that artists will use words like craft when discussing their work. We should not take it utterly for granted that humans manufacture and construct objects whose purpose is to help us reflect upon our lives. It is the most astonishing thing in the world. It is far easier to understand shelter, a home, and office building. It is less easy to understand a poem, a movie, and a ballet, at least in the sense that I am discussing, as human manufacturing.

Memoirs From Youth, Part Fourteen: School Trip to D.C.

In the year of 1979, at the age of twelve, I found myself stuck in one of those various "free" schools with which my parents were always experimenting. (The word free here is not a reference to the tuition). This particular one was called an Academy which belied the free-wheeling lack of pedagogy, if not outright incoherence of the actual content of the school. The headmaster was an obscenely obese man with a pungent, acrid body odor, given to a fondness for the therapy and life motivational teaching of one Leo Buscaglia.  We called him Principal Bob. I forget his last name.

Principal Bob would wear these Levis bell bottomed denim leisure suits and talk a lot about his parents and how much he loved them, and, well, the importance of sharing your feelings. If you were a kid who didn't "feel" like doing math or didn't "feel" like reading a book, then Principal Bob was a dream of a principal.

Though he drew the line at actually hugging his students in the Buscaglia manner, he loved to talk about love a lot in particular and the expression of the emotions in general, and noted that most of the volunteers for hugging at Buscaglia's seminars were men approaching women for hugs. Yet he reminded us "it was not about that". Then he mentioned that the Phil Donahue Show had Leo Buscaglia as a guest and made an observation that the audience was mostly female and hugged one another much more than they did Leo. At the time I did not understand the point of his observations.

One of his and other teachers' criticisms of me is that I didn't talk about my feelings enough. Indeed, every school I went to, whether Christian or secular, public or private or "free" or independent, would make the same remark. I would usually tell them that I didn't seem to have that many feelings or as many as did other people. In the milieu of these type of schools this was the equivalent of getting an F.

"If you look deep down inside you will find them," they would always say.

"I'm looking. I'm looking," was my usual reply.

One of the academy's ideas was to essentially stick a lot kids from all grades in the same classes or classrooms since the headmaster did not want us to get "hung up about life stages or ages." I had fifteen and sixteen year olds in my class. Then there was me. I think I was the youngest.

We voted for a destination for the annual school bus trip. I insisted that we visit Washington D.C. My real reason for this choice being that I wanted to see the Watergate Hotel where the Watergate scandal occurred and above all to listen those famous Nixon White House Tapes. I also said that I wanted to hear John Birks Dizzy Gillespie sing "Salt Peanuts" with then president Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn. After my peppy speech, the rest of the student body was stunned into silence and seemed to accept my idea, since any other place desired would have been too far and too expensive to visit anyway like, say, New York or Vegas.

"I am not sure we can accomodate all of your wishes Mitch. I don't know who that man you mentioned is. Dizzy? Is that the man's real name? Is he a rock musician? I do know Jimmy Carter is our president but he is a very busy man and hard to get a hold of. How do you know he is any good as a singer? I mean surely you might want to look at nice and important places like the White House or the Washington monument... but you want to look at..the Watergate Hotel, It's just a boring building. The Lincoln monument is so beautiful, why I'll never forget when my mom took us to first see the..."

"Watergate hotel." I kept repeating as if in a chant.

"Well Mitch D.C. it is. I'll see what we can do."

The school was broke so in order to raise money for a humble greyhound bus tour to D.C from Tampa was to hold a car wash for a week, every day, thus suspending reading, writing and arithmetic for that week. Thus we proceeded into a suburban used car lot with water, buckets and sponges and waited for any Gremlin, Buick, or Pontiac that happened to drive into this lot. I didn't pay much attention to the cars since, as I said earlier, most of the students were older than me and female, and in halter tops and cutoff denims. I really enjoyed that week in the sun, trying to get these folks' cars as clean as possible. I also wondered why you could talk about some feelings out loud and not others and I always seemed to have the sort of feelings nobody else talked about. Feelings, indeed.

Now day after day, up until about Thursday, I had to put up with the other students' musical selections on the 8 Track. After about fifty hours of Foghat, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, Kiss, ACDC, Foreigner, Queen and heaven knows what else, I had to eventually put my water logged foot down. "Why aren't we playing appropriate music for our car wash?" I pleaded. "you know what I mean! Don't pretend you don't know because they had a movie named just like what we all are doing right now! You mean you haven't seen the movie? You know," I said with a wink.

"No Mitch. No! No disco! Haven't we told you before?" other kids yelled, as if in unison. They had complained before about my predominantly African-American taste in popular music.

"Well business has been slow and the song is about car washes. Maybe Mitch is right," Principal Bob finally said.

Into the stereo went the 8 Track of Rose Royce's Car Wash. I can tell you we were jammed all of Thursday and Friday. And we got a good groove going to our wash too.


Indeed we did so well that we upgraded to an Amtrak train trip!

One memorable event on that train trip, other than the taste of the pancakes that seemed to me so delicious, was that an older girl that I used to have big crush on when I was ten or eleven had decided, inexplicably, to make "sexual" advances on me late at night. She must have been fourteen or fifteen at this time. Now you understand this was just kissing and fondling of course. And it felt very good. But I had other concerns. Not only had I lost interest in her - as a person or potential "friend" - after her rebuff  to my initiative two years earlier, but given that we were in public and on a train I felt it was too risky. I felt exposed. I  rudely knocked her hand away from my lap and pushed her whole body away from mine when she started to hug and kiss me. I insisted that this was not the time or place.

"It is a private manner among adults. I mean Principal Bob is right in the row behind us. You are doing this now on purpose because you don't really want to be alone with me. Why can't you wait till we are home and our parents are at the Winn Dixie or something?" She got up and left without a word, moving to the another car in the train altogether,

Boy was she mad. The whole rest of the trip, and, come to think of it, decades hence, she has not been the warmest soul. I understand she now has four kids and is an aesthetician in Palm Springs.

Nothing prepared me for the sensual joy of landing in D.C. The very first sensations I experienced were aural. This being D.C. and a largely African-American population, for the first time in my entire life I heard the music I loved most played openly and loudly. It was like a reverse of the natural order of things.  Wafting from cars or transistor radios, or record shops I heard simultaneously Earth Wind and Fire, The O'Jays, Sister Sledge, The Ohio Players: that kind of stuff. What joy for me! What kind of magical place was this?

Then it got even better. Not only did I hear all of this great popular music but louder than anything else was something that I thought I would never hear in public. I heard a distinctive tenor saxophone solo, no vocals, not a song but an instrumental. Wait a minute. Was that Dexter Gordon on tenor? Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin? "The Blues Up and Down?" I had that record. I had to immediately find where that record was being played.


Following my ears led me to this record store. I fled towards the sound of Dexter Gordon's tenor as if the sound was the elixir of everlasting life.  All thoughts of luggage, my class, our hotel, even the Watergate Hotel and the Nixon tapes were but meaningless inconveniences. Dexter's tenor led me to this tiny record store in the heart of downtown D.C. just two blocks from the station. Behind the counter this middle aged man with an enormous afro asked me, "what can I do for you son?"

"Hello. You are playing Dexter Gordon and Johnny Griffin! Do you like Dexter Gordon too? That's the Blues Up and Down".

"Do I like Dexter Gordon?" He laughed. "Best thing that happened in this country is him coming back to the States. That's very unusual that you recognize that. Well of course we are playing that. This is a jazz store, mainly. My name is Sam and this is my place. I decided to call it Sam's records. This is like a home to me. Maybe someday you can get a place of your own when you get older too."

I kept asking all sorts of questions. Did he personally know any of these musicians?

"Well I'll be happy to tell you that Miles Davis is a family friend. His parents were friends of mine in Illinois. But I'm not that close. Sometimes we do promotional things with musicians. Like Dexter was here last week. I got this record signed by him!"

"When is Miles Davis going to record again?"

"That is a very good question. I think he's getting more health conscious now. He is gonna come back. You'll see. Let me show you something. Look the cover of this record and look at the inside. You ever see a record like that? Now this music is really different. Unusual. The last time he put a horn to his mouth this is what it sounded like. Tell me what you think. Now remember: some people approve, others don't. I'd like to know your opinion." And then he went over and put this record on. "You know," he continued, "I've always said, and I don't care what anybody will tell you but you remember this, that there's good music and bad music not this, that, or the other label of music,  electric or natural music etc. You ever hear a wah-wah trumpet before?"

"What's a wah-wah trumpet?"

I had never seen any drawing like this in my life. It captivated me.

 The spell of this vivid artwork and the hypnotic music was broken when suddenly the record store was invaded by cops and a screaming Principal Bob. I wondered if I was going to be arrested and felt momentary terror.

"Mitch," Bob yelled, "We've been looking all over this damn city for you. How many times have I told you to stay with the group? You stay with the team! With the group! Over and over! You always like to wander everywhere. You just wander. Not everybody is nice in this world or good you know. I'm going to talk to your mother about this and tell her you don't know how to stay with others and that you are selfish, very selfish.  When you took off just now you were telling all of us that you don't love us and don't care about us. Do you realize that? A record store? You have record stores in Tampa! Why do you need to come to a record store? What is so special about a record store?" He stopped and met Sam's eyes in awkward silence.

"It's okay," Sam said, his eyes not leaving mine. "I was just teaching Mitch something about our musical heritage. You can't get much more American than that. That is about as important as Thomas Jefferson or George Washington if you ask me." Sam said.

I don't remember much about the rest of that trip except a bunch of monumental architecture. (Some of this was quite monumental).  I never did get to hear those White House tapes after all. The tour guide talked a lot about them but said they were intended for adult ears only. I spent most of the rest of trip looking at Lisa in her halter tops and cut off shorts and wondering what I would do with my life when I got back home. I knew I was in for some harsh punishment by the school, a punishment which included staying at home and writing some report on responsibility towards others, or something like that. I was to be allowed to return to the school only when I was "in touch enough with my feelings" enough to hand in the report.

Yet what I remember most about that whole trip was Sam. The record store, like so many staples and cultural foundations of our collective past and youth, seems to recede now. I do miss it so.

Book Review: HOLLYWOOD INCOHERENT: Narration in Seventies Cinema by Todd Berliner

I have a belief that reviewing and, moreover, criticism ought to be in part a dispassionate affair: that there ought to be in it more objectivity of appraisal and comprehension than the subjectivity of enthusiasm and censure. There are times of course when a special case and exception can be made, where subjectivity must, by definition, lead and flourish. Given that the subjects of Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent are cinema and the 1970s, two topics dear to this author's heart, and, given that the approach and style of the book is an aesthetic one rather than a theory addled or ideological one, upon completing this book it appears at times as if the book had been written with this reviewer alone in Berliner's mind.

Hollywood Incoherent is a much welcome and needed addition to the growing body of both 1970s and cinema scholarship. One of the virtues of it is that it puts style at the center, rather than political ideologies, identities and historical and cultural significance. In many ways Berliner (and to be fair, others must be mentioned in this regard, namely, Susan Sontag, Ray Carney, David Bordwell and a few others) is attempting to return criticism to a position somewhat close to the aesthetic and artistic concerns that had been dominant in the decades prior to the Theory revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet Berliner is unafraid of theory and uses it when necessary. Indeed his book takes the time to define David Bordwell's concept of "parametric narration", rather than assuming knowledge on the part of the reader, and also makes a good case for why such a concept is perfectly valid in understanding general trends in 1970s studio and independent filmmaking. Still, in the end, Berliner follows in the matter and manner of "close reading", which concerns how objects in the movies create the effect they do, and what the implications are of such effects on the emotions of audiences.

Two concepts that Berliner introduces that are helpful are those of "incoherence" and "perversity". These words are redefined not as negative states of personal or collective organization or psychology, but rather, positive states of works of art. Perversity is taken from critic Stephen Booth to mean in Booth's words, (in Booth's Precious Nonsense), "a usually gratuitous and potentially distracting and counterproductive extra system of coherence that rivals the narrative, polemic, or other ideationally essential organization of the work". One of the themes that crops up in practically every film made in the 1970s is this evenhanded and observational quality that is the effect of a certain disunity regarding closure concerning the morality or psychology of the characters on the screen and the causality and temporality of visual events as they unfold. In Berliner's words:

"Although all narrative films employ a degree of perversity (without turns there is no narrative), the relatively prevalent, pointed, and superfluous narrative perversities in seventies cinema do more than delay satisfaction and narrative resolution: The preclude the definitive and satisfying resolutions characteristic of more normative Hollywood movies."

Even in the case of ostensibly lower brow fare like The Exorcist, there is the same effect at work as in other higher quality films of the same period and this effect has cognitive value for spectators: "I propose that spectators leave The Exorcist having had an experience more cognitively eventful than the film's shocks, thrills, and thematic substance can account for".

Whatever one may think of The Exorcist as a film, Berliner's account of its specifically 1970s characteristics is consistently interesting.

Following in the steps of David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, and, to go back even further, Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, Berliner raises the question of style as opposed to meaning as a critical category. In a chapter of a close reading of Taxi Driver, for example, Berliner shows how stylistic effects can be as valuable as and different from meaning, as a way of comprehending a work of art. Moreover Berliner defends his case very well, especially given the weight of certain traditions in thinking "meaning" the key to art's purpose. In Berliner's book, each film is analyzed with exacting scrutiny, neither abandoning the text for dubious historical or sociological claims, nor viewing the films in isolation from the cultural context in which they were made.

Many of the big commercial films are discussed in this volume, specifically those prior to the Star Wars phenomenon that arguably ushers in the 1980s. There is a subtle reading of The French Connection as a violation of police genre norms.

One of the most valuable parts of the book is the chapter on John Cassavetes. Ray Carney has been and is the undisputed scholarly expert on Cassavetes' oeuvre. Berliner adds his voice to the discussion with a perceptive essay on real life dialogue and scripted and aesthetic dialogue and how the differences between the two are negotiated by a modernist master like John Cassavetes. The one chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. Noting the dilemma that any artist faces in confronting on the one hand the false and artificial effects of "trying" to be "realistic" and, on the other, the prison of traditional and classical conventions in representation, Cassavetes hit upon a brilliant third solution.

"Cassavetes' dialogue, more than conventional, tightly scripted dialogue, prevents spectators from easily distinguishing his actors' improvisations from the improvisations of Cassavete's characters, who, like the actors playing them, appear to be composing their lines as they are speaking".

Though Berliner is aware of dimension of authorship and refers to the hand of directors and writers (and no hand is more authorial than Cassavetes), he is always keen to note that 1970s cinema is a continuum, that the films in the period all share similar features, some more than others, and that they have a certain family resemblance, that, though they do influence current cinema - (Berliner notes Eastwood's Unforgiven and P. T. Anderson's Magnolia as being particularly seventies in feeling) - they are unique in being rather unlike anything to have come before or since the 1970s.

If there is anything to the concept of a 1970s aesthetic in film and if it can be understood to have coherence, then Todd Berliner's Hollywood Incoherent is a useful introduction to such a concept.

There is much here for fans of both 1970s scholarship and cinema studies in general. In my view, Berliner's book deserves a rightful place alongside previous classics of 1970s scholarship like Bruce Schulman' The Seventies and Thomas Hine's The Great Funk. As a work of film criticism it is a welcome corrective to the excesses of theory found in other film studies. More constructively, it is a good application of the "cognitive neo-formalism" of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. It succeeds in applying the ideas humanely, staying lose to the films in discussion, and being faithful to art as having a value more than that of mere utility.

Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner, University Of Texas Press, 2010

Book Review: GETTING LOOSE, Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s Sam Binkley (Duke University Press 2007)

As a non professional scholar and obsessive of all things 1970s related it seems there is always more to learn and in turn be inspired that most complex and crazy of decades. I thought Bruce Schulman's THE SEVENTIES an excellent start, especially on the (party) politics of the period. I also endorse Thomas Hine's THE GREAT FUNK as it has an orientation towards what in academe is called "material culture" and actually attempts to investigate and make sense of the DESIGN of the period.

But in GETTING LOOSE, Sam Binkley has added another important voice to the discussion, that of sociology and cultural studies in general and the "genealogy" of Foucault in particular. I have a vexed and ambivalent relationship to some of cultural studies in general. Sam Binkley's book, however, as old fashioned as it may to be to put it this way, is simply excellent history. In GETTING LOOSE Binkley makes us go on a journey through some of the most important psychological developments of that period, and their implications for today. It is an intellectually curious book, at times funny, but most of all, at once critical and evenhanded, even entertaining.

One of the ways Binkley accomplishes all of this is through examples of texts from the period (some of the most exotic are the hippie and communal and handmade alternative family newsletters) as well as narratives of the men and women who wrote them. An attempt is made to get inside the motivations and minds of the people as well as draw political conclusions about their varied and various projects. The book is filled with reproductions of some of the most iconic as well as lesser known examples of the various cultures that flourished then. Also each chapter focuses on a certain aspect of the decade in great detail, for example, the story if Ida Rolf and rolfing, the exploits of gurus like Stewart Brand, and the explosive creativity of the women's movement contribution to psychology and health. This is a dense book: there is a lot here and it all adds up to a thorough if motley and cubistic picture.

As one reads the book a genuine paradox emerges: this is that "getting loose" becomes both a kind of liberation of body, mind and spirit and from rigid "boxes" of the past. Yet at the same time getting loose itself becomes a compulsory regime of discipline. In Binkley's narrative there is no free space of uncompromised purity. Like Marx and his dialectic, the radical changes wrought by the new modes of being and behaving serve contradictory yet inextricable ends. The result is an extraordinary shift consciousness perhaps parallel to that which occurred after developments like Gutenberg's press. As Binkley succinctly puts it:

"Identity today requires reflexivity and the willingness to make substance out of one's choice of oneself, but also a tolerance for the ultimately ephemeral quality of this substance, whose fragmented story one rewrites with every mundane lifestyle choice".

Reading this I was often reminded of Clane Hayward's memoir THE HYPOCRISY OF DISCO. Clane Hayward's book is a very good book of literature, a memoir of some of the more extreme of the alternative living arrangements and from the point of view of children living with and "under" them. Like Hayward, Binkley makes you understand and empathize with the struggles of some of these pioneers to make a different and, to their mind, better world. Also like Hayward, there is a sense of pain too when it fails or goes awry. As Bruce Schulman pointed out in a more explicitly political context, there is a sense in which "doing your own thing" could be a new form of restriction, that is, a new way for conservative and purely market forces to extend their influence over all of everyday life.

GETTING LOOSE is a must for those interested in American history and in some of the changes in our lives that have come to us over the past forty-odd years. Reading it, I wished more scholars in Binkley's model shared his flair for the stories of history and comprehension of subject matter. Whereas all too often I find them a bit bland or ideological, I find Binkley immersive and scrupulous. Reading it proves there is much excitement still in the fields of sociology and American studies. I came away from GETTING LOOSE as confirmed as ever in my view that the 1970s has never been more relevant to many of the basic cultural and material matters that at times we take for granted.